Email outreach to PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson, Sept. 19, 2018

We sent the following email to PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson on Sept. 19, 2018 at 11:23 a.m. (EDT):

A Sept. 12, 2018 PunditFact story, where you received the writing credit, contains the following line (given bold emphasis) in the section assessing Joe Scarborough’s claim in terms of percentage of GDP:

The chart does show that, when looking at a percentage of GDP, Scarborough is correct in his comparison. Debt as a percentage of GDP in 2017 was far higher (almost 77 percent) than it was in 1976 (about 27 percent).

We have spent the past week trying to interest PolitiFact in running a correction on this part of the story. Having apparently failed in that (failing as well to obtain any comment from PolitiFact), we are preparing to publish a story about the error and PolitiFact’s response.